❝ bloody — but unbowed...

ʰ ᵃ ʳ ᵇ ᶤ ᶰ ᵍ ᵉ ʳ The most painful goodbyes are the ones that are never said and never explained.

[praesidi]

|| PRIVATE || EREN JAEGER || SELECTIVE ||

「 PRAESIDI 」 Etymology // from praeses (“guardian, defender”) +-ium or praesideō (“to guard, defend”) +-ium

❝To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be seen.❞

Eren Jaeger rp blog from snk // covering canon and divergent, modern and reincarnation, original ideas and inspiration off other media // written by Key, they/them, est. 2014 and resurrected in 2024, 21+ only

|| RULES || VERSES || PROMPTS || PINTEREST ||

[piskikone]

The moon is for all of us

social media and store You are not allowed to use, copy or trace my art. Thank you.

[massensterben-deactivated202503]

for @praesidi

In some future history book, (if there is a future, if there is a history), it will seem to an anonymous reader such a strange play of life. What alliance can be forged from hatred that does not cannibalize itself at the slightest touch? How can two people from opposite sides of the same divide reach out and touch? There is no middle ground. There is only the abyss beneath their feet. 

That is where Eren found him. Even the glint of a vicious knife starts looking friendly when the alternative is blackness. Any eyes will do as long as they look at you with purpose. Bertholdt listened for a long time that night, that first of many nights. And then he nodded, once. And now they are here and the sun falls like dust in their eyes.

Around them, the backdrop plays out: distant rooftops, smoking chimneys, shuffling feet of dazed patients drag themselves across the hospital’s courtyard. Bertholdt sits stiffly in his uniform, a glaring red armband biting into his bicep, and lights a cigarette. His fingers do not shake. The charade tightens around him like a corset, like a straitjacket. He does not dare to move in anything but increments. What does he fear he will trigger? His titan or Eren's? They both must play with their hands in the air, all sharp objects kicked aside.

But he thinks about it. How easily all progress could be rendered void. If he were to reach out his hand, almost tenderly, and broke Eren's neck... The clock would reset. The entire chessboard upended, the forces that be would need to call remis. The Founding Titan recedes back into the masses, tossed to the wind for someone else to bear. Buy the entire planet a couple more years. He wishes he were pragmatic enough for that, for the right thing. But the unwilling dead drive their heels into his sides again, moaning in his ear to give their deaths purpose. It cannot be over until they were made useful.

So Bertholdt sits there and smokes and stares at the looming hospital across the yard. Somewhere else, a patient screams.

"Kruger, is it?" His voice rasps and rumbles, like a rock breaking off a cliff. The smoke has sandpapered his vocal cords into fraying ropes. His heart swallows itself as he focuses on anything but the silent horror by his side. "Shame about the leg."

[praesidi]

Eren watches the gore liquefy beneath his boots, precious ichor seeping into his clothes, climbing his pant legs like grasping, clawing hands. The smell of rot and decay churns at his guts. The heady tang of iron clings to the back of his tongue. He listens to bird song weave through damned wailing, thousands upon thousands of voices reduced down to one hellish scream.

Why did it come to this?

Kruger. A stone thrown through glass, Bertholdt's voice questions the name from somewhere beside him and the result is like a line cast into the dark. Even as the name itself acts as a coaxing finger, tempting the turn of his head back to other memory where he may gaze out from his fathers eyes, filled with grief and confusion. He hones in on the pitch and tumble of that voice, ignores the sickening perspective shift of being instead the one to stare down at Grisha Jaeger’s turmoil, until all that remains once more is a bench in a hellish hospital courtyard...

Eren stares at his lap, a deep shadow beneath the dulled gaze. Shame, he claims. But Eren can still see the limb, even feel the weight of it, the pain from hacking through meat and bone. More side effects from his wandering through the paths again. He tips his head to take in the fiery beacon beside him. Bertholdt would not be his first choice as anchor. But there is an undeniable ease in using their now rotted out and hollow familiarity as a point of focus. Moth to a flame. With his presence, his questioning, the insincere pitying of a lost limb, Eren at least knows where he is, when he is.

“It’s been worse.” His voice cracks from a lack of use. He lifts his one good eye from the smoke curling around Bertholdt's hand to the patient creeping past with horrific whispers spilling from dry, split lips. “Do you know the name? Kruger.”

[leatherandmossprints]

‘The Fall of Phaeton’ (detail) by Hendrick Goltzius, after Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, c. 1588.

[praesidi]

verses!

[praesidi]

tags!

[anyeka]

i had an extra hour to spend so I drew Eren

[praesidi]

no one is prepared to hear my thoughts about the non-corporeal horror that is existence with the attack titan and its ability to access the past and future but im going to write it all down anyways.

[mournfulroses]

Suzanne Scanlon, from "Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen," published in 2024

[praesidi]

What Are Your Hands Covered In? Except I psychoanalyze your issues with love

|| Calluses.

You have always known work. You have always known labour and the kind of love that is blisters splitting open, is people bandaging your hands after a long day. You are burned by the sun, whether it be your skin or your soul that is singed. There is not a part of you that isn’t scorched, turned tired and overused, as brittle as a piece of glass reflecting the dawn. You are strong, yes, but only physically. Is it worth it, this ache in your bones? Is it worth it each morning, to only ever give and work and never be offered a semblance of what you deserve?

tagged by: @mercurialstorm :3

tagging: do it punk asses

[praesidi]

i am alive i swear. the brain has just not wanted to brain lately. very sorry to my oldest drafts (how has it been a month, i will cry). but i am beginning to crack into them now. promise i still adore you all

[kosmogrl]

by comfortintheunknown

[praesidi]

I will make jokes quite often about Eren's ravenous appetites, his bottomless pit stomach, ordering double servings and finishing off half of it before someone else has really made a dent in their one.

But isn't there something to say about a character that is always hungry? Maybe it isn't so literal all the time. How do you fill up the yawning void inside you? The one that has been there since the day you were born. Always in need of more, something more. An endless hunt to be satisfied. Nothing ever satisfies...

And I wake every night Crying, "Set me free"

[praesidi]

What are your favourite ships for Eren?

Yes.

I am kidding (sort of). My down bad partnership for Eren has always been and will always be Jean. Levi has long taken a close second. Armin and Annie hang in my peripheral, truly my underrated favorites. Otherwise? Anything goes for Eren. Mikasa is my one minor exception. I started off not seeing the potential, then absolutely saw a potential for the most tragic of romances, and promptly had the wind knocked out of those sails by the stories ending and the less than favorable part of fan responses.

[praesidi]

Why is he doing this?

Eren sits, hands clasped between the spread of his legs hung precariously over the edge of one of Paradis’ great, encircling walls. Wall Maria, so named for one of the Founder Ymir’s three daughters. Below, the corralled township of Shiganshina lies untouched the way it was nine years ago.

Why did he choose here of all places to talk?

He squints against the setting sun, its last brilliant golden fingers of light brushing over the distant arching wall of the bastion. This day, now a fixed point in the flow of time, could be marked as when it all began. The catalyst for everything that followed. Eren knows better. He has seen each event that herded them towards the end, every beat of a bird's wings, every drop of spilt blood. But the people would talk of this day as the one that damned them. His name intrinsically linked with the beginning of the end.

Maybe they are right. Maybe nothing was truly set in stone until his player's piece was thrown into the gambit. How many times has he questioned this? Wondered how much, if anything, could be changed? 

@naitfall says: ❝ You can’t change the past . ❞

Had he spoken his thoughts aloud? Or had the nature of this place imparted his thoughts to Levi on it's own? The desire so strong it could be felt, heard without words. His next breath shudders, doesn’t quite satisfy the fill of his lungs, and he licks at his lip, drags another down to fight back the angry tears.

“But I tried. When I learned what I could do— What the titan’s power could do, I searched for a point to set it all right. The day Wall Maria came down. That day in the forest…” Eren squeezes his hands together until it aches. “I saw all the different ways it could have happened.”

When he lifts his gaze to Levi’s unwavering stare, he no longer feels nineteen and tired, stretched beyond his years, resigned. He feels fifteen and terrified, immolating from the inside out with anger and pain, starving for connection, for his approval. He knows he will get none. He no longer seeks after it the way he once had. This final explanation is all he can offer by way of apology. “This was all I could do. I traded all of them for this. I’m sorry.”

[weusedtobegiants]

The children want to destroy this hungry, angry, growing thing in them, but it's becoming harder to separate that thing from who they were Before. So they live with it / become better at hiding it / start pretending that the year it all went wrong never really existed. It's easier that way, anyway.

Darshana Suresh, from Howling at the Moon

[firstfullmoon]

Robert Creeley, from “Credo”